“Onstage I make love to 25,000 people, then I go home alone,” said Janis Joplin famously at the height of her late-Sixties fame. And no other song in this blues banshee’s repertoire sums up that statement like “Piece of My Heart”.
Recorded in 1968 for Big Brother & The Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills LP, “Piece of My Heart” took the straight-up soul original by Erma Franklin (Aretha’s sister) and twisted it into four minutes of guttural pain and screaming guitars.
Janis’s vocals owe little to Franklin’s smooth take; instead, it became the Texan hippy’s greatest showcase. From the opening “Oh, come on / come on / come on . . .” through to “. . . deep down in your heart I guess you know that it ain’t right / Never never never never never never hear me when I cry at night”, Joplin instills the song with her own very real and personal heartache.
“Piece of My Heart”, however, is as much about Big Brother & The Holding Company’s arrangement as Janis’s definitive vocals. Franklin herself said she didn’t recognize it when she first heard the cover, generously noting, “Her version is so different from mine that I really don’t resent it too much”. The snap of the guitars fits perfectly with the 1968 theme, with crunching lead parts taking their cue from Cream and Jimi Hendrix.
Artists from Sammy Hagar to Beverley Knight have covered “Piece of My Heart” since, but Big Brother & The Holding Company’s version remains the watermark by which all other efforts are judged. The power of “Piece of My Heart” still endures, helping the Cheap Thrills album to No. 338 in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003, thirty-five years after it hit No. 1 in the Billboard charts.
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